What does the fu­ture of Sackville schools look like?

Com­mu­nity asked to con­sider sev­eral op­tions

The op­tions have been laid out on the ta­ble and now com­mu­nity mem­bers will have their turn to make their voices heard about what they’d like to see hap­pen to their lo­cal schools.

The An­glo­phone East School Dis­trict held the first of three pub­lic meet­ings Tues­day night in Sackville, pro­vid­ing in­for­ma­tion to par­ents, teach­ers and other con­cerned res­i­dents about the var­i­ous sce­nar­ios the com­mu­nity might want to con­sider as the clo­sure of Marshview Mid­dle School looms on the hori­zon.

“There’s go­ing to be some pos­i­tive changes to your in­fra­struc­ture in Sackville, some­thing I think the com­mu­nity’s been wait­ing for for a long time,” said Gregg Inger­soll, dis­trict su­per­in­ten­dent. “But it’s just a ques­tion of what those changes will look like.”

Inger­soll said the dis­trict is in the process of car­ry­ing out a sus­tain­abil­ity study on Marshview, as it is op­er­at­ing un­der ca­pac­ity and re­quires sig­nif­i­cant, costly re­pairs. The dis­trict ed­u­ca­tion coun­cil (DEC) voted in May to carry out the study un­der pro­vin­cial Pol­icy 409 as part of its cap­i­tal spend­ing plan.

Orig­i­nally built in 1949 as a high school with a ca­pac­ity of more than 600 stu­dents, Marshview now has an en­roll­ment of 271 stu­dents from Grades 5 to 8. And the school re­quires more than $2.34 mil­lion in de­ferred main­te­nance work – in­clud­ing up­grades to the ven­ti­la­tion sys­tem, wash­rooms, walk­way, heat­ing sys­tem, floors, site im­prove­ments, among oth­ers. An­nual op­er­at­ing costs for the school come in at around $119,000 – with nearly half that amount spent on heat­ing costs.